Visualizing structural and behavioural aspects of virtual collaboration

Collaborative virtual environments are becoming increasingly commonplace, moving out of research labs and into professional practice. Among others, they support knowledge-intensive emergent work performed by distributed teams. In these settings where conventional awareness is absent, making sense of the virtual collaboration becomes challenging. This paper introduces information visualization that aims to reveal structural and behavioural aspects of virtual collaboration, referring respectively to relationships among elements of the collaboration, and the interactions that occur as part of it. Visualization tools have to be tailored to, and express notions from, the ontology of the virtual environment employed. An example is introduced where instances of collaboration that have taken place within the LiveNet system are visualized, in terms of LiveNet´s ontology. Finally, the paper offers an outlook on how visualization tools can be assisted by software agents that learn from and actively support their human users